How Apache Ranger and Chuck Norris help secure Hadoop

The Hadoop ecosystem has always been a bag of parts, each of which needs to be secured separately -- at least they did need that, until Apache Ranger came to town

A policy creation screen from Ranger documentation

A GUI with a central view of who is allowed to do what brings much needed simplicity to the Hadoop ecosystem, but that's not all that Ranger offers. It also provides audit logging. Although this can't supplant all the application audit logging you could ever want, if you simply need to know who accessed what on HDFS or what policies were enforced where, it's probably exactly what you need.

Hadoop security has come a long way. Ranger gives a fairly comprehensive, if still a little incomplete, way to manage the ecosystem. The holes that persist are mainly due to vendor competition throughout the big data world. These can be filled via the extensibility of the project, but it would be nice to see more collaboration and community in the Apache world.